Recently I've found Henry's argument that Yankee Puritans represent a liberalizing force in American history convincing insofar as we consider free markets, universal education, individual enterprise, and universal suffrage pillars of liberal society. (Of course not all such Yankees were Federalists/Whigs, as our friends Messr.s S. Adams and Thoreau would remind us.) Taking this view, I think it's helpful to consider of the Jacksonians in line with Medieval peasants' revolts: the goal is not so much to create a new system, as to claim rights and privileges promised under the old. One could call this a sort of "poor-man's reactionary leftism" in a very literal sense.
With all due respect to Henry, I have not seen this dynamic well demonstrated at all on the ground in politics beyond the education issue during the period in question. Yankee Puritans routinely lined up behind WASP dominated, protectionist and/or nativist dominated political machines throughout the course of the 19th century. Now yes there was a liberal element in the region, but the story of the early 19th century is of that element's decline in voting power. Even before the Whigs had collapsed, they had already come to dominate in large measure Southern New England and Vermont, because of a variety of factors and it is no accident that the Dorr Rebellion occurred at all during this period and failed. It would be almost 100 years before the WASP machine will be toppled in Rhode Island, and arguably only made possible because the state had become majority Catholic.
Sure when you examine the religious doctrines there are some egalitarian attributes and there are some issues where this manifests (education and abolition, much later, women's suffrage), but on the whole we frankly
do not see this and instead one sees typical attributes of polarization between the previous religious/ethnic majority and the rising majority with support for restrictions on the political power of the latter supported by the former. Political transformation then occurring when a critical mass of power is finally obtained by the rising demographic to toss out the former establishment. Rhode Island in the early 1930's, Massachusetts in the late 1940s and 1950s.
